The signals Voyager sent to Earth to give us these pictures looked something like this:

. . . 1101 0010 1001 0101 0000 1011 0001 . . .

How did we ever make enough sense of these 1's and 0's to get these magnificent images?

Spacecraft engineers and computer scientists have had to solve many big problems. But none of these problems could be tackled without one thing: a special language so people could communicate with machines. That language makes . . .

Spacecraft seem very smart.

The huge dish antennas that pick out the spacecraft's signal from millions of miles away seem very smart.

The computers that decode and process the signals into pictures seem very smart.

But none of these machines can learn learn English, or Spanish, or any other human language the way people can. These machines understand only two ideas:

So the big question is.

How do we feed complicated information IN and get complicated information OUT, if we can only say "ON" and "OFF"?

By Subject

By Type

The signals Voyager sent to Earth to give us these pictures looked something like this:

. . . 1101 0010 1001 0101 0000 1011 0001 . . .

How did we ever make enough sense of these 1's and 0's to get these magnificent images?

Spacecraft engineers and computer scientists have had to solve many big problems. But none of these problems could be tackled without one thing: a special language so people could communicate with machines. That language makes . . .

Spacecraft seem very smart.

The huge dish antennas that pick out the spacecraft's signal from millions of miles away seem very smart.

The computers that decode and process the signals into pictures seem very smart.

But none of these machines can learn learn English, or Spanish, or any other human language the way people can. These machines understand only two ideas:

So the big question is.

How do we feed complicated information IN and get complicated information OUT, if we can only say "ON" and "OFF"?